As enterprises get their arms around working with hybrid cloud architectures, the issue of managing individual cloud applications in a hybrid resource pool quickly comes to the forefront.

Cloud applications decouple application components from specific server and storage resources to create a "pool' that can be employed to maximize utilization and reduce costs. A company can contribute its own servers to the pool to create a private cloud, and it can also use one or more public cloud providers to host non-mission-critical applications or act as an overflow or failover resource in case of problems with its own data centers.